Items Tagged: Storage+Virtualization

I am impressed with the professionalism of your staff. The questions [in the interview] were well thought out and addressed the specifics of my answers to the survey questions. I found your team to be well prepared and sufficiently well versed in the technologies we are planning to employ to make the interview comfortable and very pleasant.

IBM Makes the V-word Respectable Again - Opinion

The word “virtualization” came into vogue a few years ago with the usual fanfare, hype and the expectation that it would solve all the horrendous storage management problems the industry was facing. Virtualization was to be the cure for all ills.

MaXXan ships MVX320 - Company Profile

MaXXan this month became the first vendor to actually GA an intelligent director class product. While the architecture is sound and the product has most of the required features for such a product, and the use of standard OTS network processors, rather than custom designed ASICs gives them the ability to upgrade and ship faster than others, MaXXan finds itself in a very interesting position.

McData Acquires Sanera Nishan - Opinion

On August 25, 2003, McData announced its intentions to acquire Nishan Systems for $83M in cash (plus $2M in debt) and Sanera for $102M in cash. McData also announced that they have invested $6M in Aarohi Communications, a storage networking chip vendor.

Cloverleaf Intelligent Storage Networking System - Product Profile

Over the course of 2003, the concept of placing “intelligent” storage management in the heart of the networked fabric has shifted from longstanding industry pipedream into deployed reality. On the end user side, this long-awaited reality is driven largely by an unprecedented requirement to get control over heterogeneous environments and budget-busting management inefficiencies.

Cloverleaf Delivers Muscle To Storage Integrators - Opinion

Though it may hurt the brain to contemplate, the mission-critical design requirements of the enterprise storage integrator exceed those of the individual enterprise data center by several magnitudes. The reason is simple: With dozens or hundreds of customer environments at any given time, economic success depends on bullet-proofing all aspects of the storage architecture against random acts of unreliability.

Candera: Storage Tiers and ATA - Technology Brief

Taneja Group sees many end users deploying multiple classes of storage devices, or “storage tiers” in order to increase the economies and overall utilization of their storage environment. In most of these cases, we see users leveraging lower costs ATA and serial ATA (SATA) arrays alongside more expensive fibre-channel storage fabrics.

EMC Invista: The Power of Network-Based Virtualization - Technology in Depth

There was a time when virtualization was one of the dirty words in the storage industry. Who can forget the enormous expectations around virtualization that existed several years ago? That hype only fizzled, and the broken promise of virtualization left many storage managers disappointed.

QLogic Buys Troika - Opinion

On October 19, 2005 QLogic announced its intention to buy Troika Networks for $36.5M. Based on the calls we have received thus far it is apparent that vendors and users alike are wondering why QLogic did this and what the implications are for users long term. Here is how we see it.

SAN Symphony 6.0

Server virtualization today is a hot topic. Enterprises everywhere are rapidly implementing virtualized servers in a quest for better resource utilization, simplified management, and a more flexible infrastructure. Over 85% of these virtualized servers use a SAN and a shared storage model. Unfortunately, server virtualization with shared storage exacerbates pre-existing storage management issues, and in many cases creates new challenges not present in a purely physical world.

IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller 4.1 - Solution Profile

Storage virtualization has come a long way in the past five years. After a false start in 2001, fraught with inflated expectations and product deficiencies, the category fell into infamy. Several vendors disappeared, many others repositioned themselves to focus on the Small Medium Business (SMB) space and yet others reinvented themselves with completely different products. Only one company stayed true to the promise of virtualization from the very beginning. That is IBM. With the SAN Volume Controller (SVC) product, launched in July, 2003, the company nurtured the market, in spite of the fact that many in the market didn’t even want to say the V-word anymore. IBM persisted, albeit mostly with their own customers, fundamentally because the customer could see the potential of storage virtualization and could count on IBM to support them through the early learning cycles.

This spring, Emulex announced availability of the Model 765-S Intelligent Services Platform. We believe that the Emulex 765-S Intelligent Services Platform has the potential to be quite disruptive to the pricing environment for storage virtualization products. Traditionally, most storage virtualization products have had high-end price points, limiting their adoption to core data centers and the largest of enterprises. When paired with LSI’s StoreAge SVM software, the platform represents a full-fledged split-path storage virtualization solution with excellent performance.

Server virtualization has become a tried and true approach for enabling a new level of cost savings and operational efficiency in the data center. Enterprises everywhere are rapidly implementing virtualized servers in a quest for better resource utilization, simplified management, and a more flexible infrastructure. Over 85% of these virtualized servers use a SAN and a shared storage model.

DataDirect Networks (DDN): Incredibly Well Positioned

From computing perspective this decade is looking very different than the previous one. Data centers are in the midst of metamorphosis in almost every dimension. Physical servers running single applications are being replaced with fewer larger physical servers running virtual machines. Networks are already being built with unified 10GbE fabrics, with storage and network traffic riding simultaneously on them. Virtualization principles are being applied at all layers of computing and storage technology. Vendors and IT are paying serious attention to power, cooling and space requirements, perhaps for the first time ever. Storage virtualization is finally a well-understood concept and vendors are feverishly implementing fine-grained virtualization in their products (or rapidly buying those that have them).

Optimization For Real-Time Storage: IBM’s SAN Volume Controller

Storage virtualization has come a long way in the past seven years. After a false start in 2001, fraught with inflated expectations and product deficiencies, the category fell into infamy. Several vendors disappeared, many others repositioned themselves to focus on the Small Medium Business (SMB) space and yet others reinvented themselves with completely different products. Only one company stayed true to the promise of virtualization from the very beginning: IBM.

IBM’s SAN Volume Controller (SVC) product launched in July, 2003. The company took SVC and nurtured the market, in spite of the fact that many in the market didn’t even want to say the V-word anymore. IBM persisted, fundamentally because the customer could see the potential of storage virtualization and could count on IBM to support them through the early learning cycles.

The payoff for IBM is huge. IBM has now shipped more than 12,000 SVC engines operating behind more than 5000 SVC systems. SVC is a mature, enterprise-proven product that has demonstrated proven ROI to its customers. IBM has shown that SVC and its in-band architecture can scale to handle the largest, most stringent enterprise SAN environments. By doing so, IBM has led the market where others have only slowly followed.

The value of storage virtualization is unquestioned. It helps rein in storage capital expenses (CAPEX) and operational expenses (OPEX) that are otherwise running amok. It provides a forum to perform storage management in a consistent fashion even while the underlying physical storage is heterogeneous and possesses its own idiosyncrasies. In our view, it is also a key building block for the next generation data center that will focus on delivering a variety of services. IBM knew that and held steady. We believe the payoff until now is a shadow of what it is to come, as IBM ties storage virtualization to other efforts, such as server blades and server virtualization.

More recently, IBM has taken one more not inconsequential step in defining what value is when it comes to SVC and virtualization. That step is the introduction of Real-time Compression, integrated into the high performance controllers of SVC as an in-line technology that can be used against production data. In this Product Brief, we’ll take a look at SVC and its historical differentiators, and what compression for real-time, primary storage means for SVC customers – the value is no less than tremendous.

EMC recently GA'd a first version of ViPR. Many storage folks are not still clear about what ViPR is all about. Is it just storage virtualization repackaged to augment EMC's physical infrastructure solution features this time? Is it a shining new example of Software Defined Storage? Is it unified storage, management, and data services ala private cloud? What is going on here?

After the big gush and splash of days in Vegas at EMCWorld 2014, we have had a few days to chew on the news and have come up with some interesting takeaways -
1. Acquisition of DSSD
2. ViPR 2.0, ViPR SRM, and the new ECS appliance
3. Big data, HDFS and three EMC solutions so far
...

The era of IT infrastructure convergence is upon us. Every major vendor has some type of offering under this category. Startups and smaller players are also "talking" convergence. But what exactly is convergence and why are all the vendors so interested in getting included in this category? We will explain below the history of convergence, what it is, what it is not, what benefits accrue from such systems, who the players are, and who is leading the pack in true convergence.